The Real Reason Shy Toddlers Speak Late

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Toddlers who don't talk much may not necessarily have a language
delay, new research finds. Shy kids understand words, but when
spoken to, they may clam up instead of speaking up.

The study is a step toward unraveling the question of why
temperamentally shy children seem to
develop language more slowly than other toddlers. Delayed
speech is linked to social struggles later in life, so
researchers wanted to understand whether shy kids can't produce
language or simply don't want to.

The good news is that shy kids don't show language acquisition
delays, said study researcher Soo Rhee, a psychologist at the
University of Colorado, Boulder.

About 15 percent of 12- to 24-month olds have shy temperaments.
These kids exhibit what's known as "behavioral inhibition." They
are bashful around other people and shrink away from new
experiences.

Shyness is part of the normal range of human
personalities, but numerous studies have linked a shy
attitude to language delays in kids. In some cases, shy kids
struggle with peer relationships and anxiety and depression later
in life.

Scientists had floated a number of theories to explain why shy
toddlers speak less adeptly than their more
outgoing peers. Perhaps these children avoid interaction, so
they get less practice speaking. Or the language struggles may
come first, making children reluctant to interact with others.
Another theory held that shy children aren't delayed at all;
rather, extroverts are ahead of the curve.

Finally, some studies hinted that shy toddlers aren't really
delayed — they "know it, but won't say it," Rhee and her
colleagues write in an upcoming issue of the journal Child
Development.

Not sayin'

To test these ideas, the researchers recruited 408 families with
same-sex twins in Boulder County, Colo. They conducted home
visits and had the children come into the psychology laboratory
at 14 months of age, 20 months and 24 months.

At these visits, the researchers assessed each child's
temperament by observing how much they cried, clung to their
parent or exhibited self-soothing behaviors such as
thumb-sucking. They also tested
language development by asking each child to imitate sounds,
ask for help and follow directions. These tests determined how
much language a child could produce, and separately, how much he
or she could understand.

The
shy children did show delays in their spoken language
compared with more outgoing kids, the researchers found. But
there was no such link between temperament and receptive
language, or how much language a child understands.

Furthermore, the lack of speaking wasn't related to any actual
language impediment. The researchers looked at the growth in
language skills over time relative to each child's behavior. If
they found that initial shyness led to initial language struggles
and to less growth, it would suggest the kids weren't practicing
speaking enough, explaining their deficits.

If, in contrast, the link between shyness and language showed up
in expressive (spoken) language, but not in receptive
(understood) language, it would support the notion that shy kids
are functioning at the same language level but not displaying
their talent. The latter was the case in this study.

And while delayed speech can be a sign of undiagnosed
developmental problems, parents of shy kids may not need to
worry. The researchers didn't look at brain development directly,
but the patterns they found suggest there wasn't anything wrong
with the shy participants physically or developmentally.

"One worry that we have is that shy children might just be
underestimated in terms of their language abilities, so parents
and teachers might not make as much of an effort to speak with
them," Rhee said. "It seems perhaps that with children who are
shy, one needs to make more of an effort to help children develop
their expressive language abilities."